Military Medevac Crews: Never Look Back
May 07--BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan -- One of the unwritten rules of being a medevac pilot is to never look behind you.
When the screaming echoes louder than the helicopter itself, don't turn around.
And once you have taken a patient to a hospital, don't go back and check on his condition.
"All too often, it ends in disappointment," said Maj. Graham Bundy, commander of the All American Dustoff, the air ambulance crew for a swath of Afghanistan roughly the size of Virginia.
At the same time, the medics, nurses or doctors in the back of the helicopter are focused intently on the patient.
No matter how the helicopter banks or tilts, they concentrate on the person whose life has been entrusted to them.
On Thursday afternoon, 1st Lt. Ashley Keiser and Sgt. Aaron King's focus was on a young Afghan soldier. X-rays showed a 7.62 mm round from an AK-47 resting along the right side of his skull.
Somehow, the soldier with the Afghan Special Forces had survived.
The medevacs were sent to take him from where he was shot on patrol near Forward Operating Base Shank, to the hospital at Bagram Airfield.
As the UH-60M Black Hawk zoomed over the countryside, King and Keiser kept watch of vital signs.
The mission was one of several for the crews, who started their day with a routine patient transfer at 1:30 p.m. but didn't return home until the sun set behind the nearby mountain ranges.
Like the day itself, the life of a medevac crew member goes in phases.
In the winter, crews may go days without a mission. But with fighting season under way, May is far from a slow month.
Crews work in 12- or 24-hour shifts, depending on whether they are the lead helicopter or the second "chase" helicopter, Bundy said.
Much of the shift may be spent waiting around the hangar, playing ping pong or card games with their radios within easy reach.
But with one squelch of communication, the games end and the crews are ready within minutes.
"As a helicopter pilot, I need to know three things: Where am I going, who am I taking and when do I need to be there," said Chief Warrant Officer 4 Chris Ryan, the company standardization pilot. "As a medevac pilot, I already know two: somebody hurt, and fast. I just need to know the third."
When the Afghan commando was loaded onto the Black Hawk, he was the fourth of five patients for the two medevac crews flying Thursday afternoon.
The day began with an hour-long flight to Forward Operating Base Ghazni, where a Fort Bragg soldier, 1st Sgt. David Robertson of Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Brigade Special Troops Battalion, 1st Brigade Combat Team, was picked up from a medevac crew out of Forward Operating Base Warrior to the south.
Robertson, who later underwent surgery at a hospital in Bagram, was injured by indirect fire at Warrior base. Shrapnel tore through his left foot, breaking bone. He said the injury meant he would return to Fort Bragg.
The two helicopters, having secured Robertson, were scarcely off the ground when they returned to Forward Operating Base Ghazni to retrieve two Afghan soldiers injured by shrapnel. The pair had been treated by Polish doctors at Ghazni.
Despite their injuries, which included wounds to the arms, legs and groin, one gave King a thumbs up mid-flight.
By the time the two Afghans were taken to a civilian hospital in Kabul, the medevac crews already had another two missions. They went on to Forward Operating Base Shank to pick up the Afghan commando and took him and Robertson back to Bagram.
From there they traveled to Jalalabad Airfield to pick up another Afghan soldier.
All told, the medevac crews were in the air for nearly six hours straight.
That night, other crews took off on their own missions. But by the morning shift change, all had fallen quiet at the hangar.
After performing their daily checks of the helicopters, the soldiers waited, and waited, and waited.
They heard rumblings of a possible patient transfer, but the time kept changing. Then, nearly eight hours after their shift began, the medevac crews snapped to attention.
"Nine line. Nine line. Nine line."
The radio code meant an urgent transport. A U.S. soldier had collapsed at a small combat outpost in Kabul, suffering a heart attack.
Within eight minutes, the two helicopters were airborne. Within 23 minutes, the patient was being loaded into one of the Black Hawks. And within 40 minutes he was carried into the hospital at Bagram.
But despite the crews being well below the standard times for such a flight, and the brigade surgeon doing treatment along the way, the soldier died later that afternoon.
The medevac crews learned of the death just seconds before leaving on another mission. The high tempo gives them little time to dwell on losses.
"This will be the norm in the summer," said Bundy, noting how the number of missions has increased in the last three weeks as fighting season began.
Medevac soldiers have to be ready at a moment's notice, he said.
Theirs is a life punctuated by flurries of adrenaline.
"I have a good friend of mine who is a firefighter in Raleigh. It is amazing how alike we are," Bundy said. "You're a spring that's just waiting."
Bundy oversees nearly two dozen crews and more than 130 soldiers across five bases in Regional Command-East. Until recently, the crews covered the entire region. Now they receive some help from a National Guard unit and the Air Force.
Still, the crews cover a vast area, which forces them to sometimes delay missions that are less urgent.
"In the winter, we can do the best for the patient," Bundy said. "Now we have to do the best we can. We have to compromise."
Copyright 2012 - The Fayetteville Observer, N.C.
